week of september 8 and 10 (for lit class)

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September 8

1. We began to use the following heuristic in order to better understand how Allen and the IRA position statement prioritized what it is students should learn when engaging with literature. Today we'll get back to that effort in earnest, and we'll add the readings for today, the NCTE position statement on 21st literacies, to our analysis and discussion
  • Enduring understandings - that which we want students to know or be able to do in their lives, now and in the future, in and out of school
  • Important to know or be able to do - that which will help students gain those enduring understandings
  • Good to be familiar with - that which is helpful for students to be acquainted with

Some questions to consider for our whole-group discussion after we meet in small groups:
  • How is each person/organization describing literature? literacy? learning?
  • How does what each person/organization is describing reflect (or not) the moment from your literacy memoir?
  • What is it that each person/organization want students to learn when they read literature?

2. On the literacy memoir... sketching out a rubric
What do we think makes for a good one? What are the traits of ones that you like to read? What must it include?
What makes for a poor one? What does it do (or not) that better ones do?

For Thursday:
  • Final draft of literacy memoir due
  • Read Chapter 2 in Teaching Literature to Adolescents (2)
  • Blog Post (Professional Response) due by class (look at our class blog for links to models of the kinds of blog postings I'm hoping you draft). If you're taking the other class, then you are also writing a post for that class. You can write a post that synthesizes readings from both classes if you like; however, such a post will need to be twice as long and you'll have to be strategic in how you connect the texts. My hope is that you are indeed making connections between the two courses, seeing how the teaching of literature and composition are related, but it may still be too early for those connections to be too explicit. You might also choose to write one post for here and one post for the other class.


September 10
Due: Literacy Memoir Final Draft; Professional Post #1; Read TLA chapter 2

1. Writing Process Report for Literacy Memoir
2. Continuing discussion from our Enduring Understanding/Important to Know and Do/Good to be Familiar With charts from Tuesday - What do we notice? What patterns do we see? What are points of distinction and difference? What might we say that these readings say about literature, reading, literacy, and learning?
3. Literacy Survey - What are our interests and habits with literacy, and how might we discover what our students' interests are? Here is a link to TLA's companion web site, specifically for chapter 2 and the literacy survey idea they have.

In class survey ideas:
types of texts
 processes
 analytic
magazines
newspapers
non-fiction books
fiction (novels or short stories)
poetry
graphic novels
drama
comics
video games
blogs
social networking sites
music
art
 reading
writing/composing
speaking/discussing
viewing
critiquing
sharing
etc.
 frequency (how often)
rankings (favs/least favs, top 3, etc.)
averages (per day, week, year, etc)
in-school or out-of school

4. Connecting our results to the reading on adolescents and literacy from TLA.

For next time:
  • Read Strategic Reading (SR) Chapter 2
  • Respond to at least two blog posts others have written